Topics in 19th Century American Literature: Frontiers
Dana Phillips profile
MWF 1
This course will focus on 19th-Century American frontiers, and the dichotomies which structured them. We will examine literary representations of both wilderness and urban frontiers, and the values which structured them in fact as well as fiction: nature vs. culture, savage vs. civilized, agrarian vs. capitalist, native vs. immigrant, and so on. We will read essays by Emerson and Thoreau, The Scarlet Letter, Whitman's poetrick, Rebecca Harding Davis' Life in the Iron Mills, excerpts from Twain, Howells' A Hazard of New Fortunes, Eleanor Stewart's Wyoming homesteading diary and Frank Norris' The Octopus, Owen Wister's western The Virginian and Jack London's Call of the Wild. Additional readings will include critical essays, and brief selections of poetry, short stories, and nonfiction. Two papers, one a research paper.
updated 2006-02-20
